“The goal is to turn data into information and information into insights” Carly Fiorina, a former executive at Hewlett-Packard Co.
* By Clayton Montarroyos
In all areas of society, there is a growing dependence on data analysis, as we have seen in this pandemic period, with the importance of qualified data in health, education, social programs, for economic recovery and to boost innovation. In view of this relevance of data analysis, we will hear more and more about data literacy (data literacy, in English). But, what is the implication of this in our day to day?
Consulting Gartner defines data literacy as “the ability to read, write and communicate data in context, including an understanding of data sources and constructions, applied analytical methods and techniques - and the ability to describe the use case, application and resulting value” . It is not an ordinary task, but it needs to be tackled.
In Brazil, the phase in which children begin to acquire data literacy skills at school is still a long way off, even with the updating of curricula. Even people who are currently in the private market, in the government or in the third sector have now started to be trained in simpler skills to reason, manipulate and visualize data, make decisions, generate insights and have predictive analysis capabilities. There is a question that became famous in presentations: "Do you speak data?" It is still a minority, but this number needs to grow.
That is why, more than ever, we must make the debate around data literacy part of our daily lives, together with discussions around artificial intelligence projects, the internet of things or smart cities. We have generated petabytes of data, but nothing will help if we don't know what to do with so much information. Recalling that, with the exponential growth of data generation, large companies are already facing the difficulties of storing an unprecedented amount of data.
Literacy in workforce data should cover all levels in companies, including managers, directors and C-levels, in order to provide effective competitive advantage. In addition, a program in the company with this focus must be an ongoing process, as the analytics, business intelligence (BI) and big data software, which help in data management (structured and unstructured), are always evolving to solve the problems. real-world problems. In addition to data literacy for the largest number of people, we will also have specialists with new data-related professions, including: big data engineer, data visualization developer and data scientist.
A relevant international initiative, which we can access in Brazil or use as a reference, is the The Data Literacy Project (Data Literacy Project), which brings together companies such as Qlik, Accenture, Cognizant, Experian, Pluralsight, the Chartered Institute of Marketing and Data to the People, and references from the academic world, to stimulate the discussion of building a society literate in data. The Brazilian market already lacks initiatives with this focus, just as we already have projects in artificial intelligence, industry 4.0 and IoT. We need to talk more about data literacy for the creation of a Brazilian data driven society.
* Clayton Montarroyos, CEO of In - Business Intelligence
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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